New Yorkers getting help (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
I was a teenager in the 1980s when I learned firsthand what it meant to face eviction and landlord harassment. Three different landlords, but they all used the same playbook: they failed to provide adequate heat, thinking they could take advantage of my family’s difficult economic situation. Allowing dangerous living conditions is a form of eviction in which landlords don’t even need to sue their tenants in court. Instead, they push tenants out with threats to their health and safety. Each year, countless tenants across our state are forced to self evict and countless others endure unsafe conditions in fear of asserting their rights and facing retaliation, or leaving their homes and finding nowhere affordable to go.
My family’s landlords were bullies who took advantage of how poverty and our court system make it tough to fight back when tenants’ rights are violated. My family faced intimidation and pressure not to defend ourselves and I was even assaulted by one of our landlords. But by the third landlord, my parents decided to stand their ground. They withheld the rent and put it in escrow. Unfortunately they were outmatched: the landlord had lawyers, while my parents couldn’t afford one. The courts allowed us one year in our apartment, but then we had to move, and pay back the rent we owed our landlord for all the months we had lived without heat.
This experience drives my belief in the absolute need for a comprehensive, universal right to counsel for New Yorkers facing eviction. No one should face eviction without counsel in any form or venue – whether it be in a lawsuit brought by a landlord, neglect of repairs, a subsidy termination or an illegal lockout. With 92,000 homeless New Yorkers and the harms of eviction well-documented, the stakes are too high for us not to ensure that tenants have a fighting chance.
The Statewide Right to Counsel (bill A.1493/S.2721) would remedy this with the guarantee of a free attorney for all New Yorkers in all types of court cases that could result in displacement. The state must act this year to pass and fund Right to Counsel through the budget, to help tenants fight to stay in their homes.
In 2021, tenants in 8% of privately-owned rental units in the city suffered under serious housing code violations, the New York City housing department’s “class C” violations that are “immediately hazardous” and violate a tenant’s legal right to safe and livable conditions. And this injustice is worse for Black and Latino New Yorkers, who are more than twice as likely to live in units with three or more maintenance deficiencies than white New Yorkers.
Unsafe and unfit housing stock plagues tenants across the state. In a 2020 study conducted by the Partnership for the Public Good in Buffalo city court, 59% of tenants reported problems with maintenance. Yet, until last year’s passage of the Tenant Dignity and Safe Housing Act (TDSHA), tenants in most localities outside New York City lacked an easy way to sue landlords for repair problems or secure rent abatements.
Building on TDSHA, a fully funded Statewide Right to Counsel would ensure tenants the right to counsel whether they are the plaintiff or defendant. Attorneys will have the time and training to litigate cases fully and counter-sue for dangerous conditions when tenants’ rights have been violated. The funding for attorneys and community organizers that advocates are calling for would also provide tenants critical support in tracking and documenting habitability violations.
The legislation is particularly important for New York City tenants, most of whom are already eligible for the city’s local Right to Counsel, which was established through a historic grassroots victory in 2017. NYC’s Right to Counsel has been tremendously successful at stopping evictions and keeping tenants housed, yet since pandemic-era eviction protections expired, courts have been pushing tenants’ cases forward at a rate that outpaces legal services capacity.
Courts have a moral obligation to uphold tenants’ Right to Counsel, but have so far been unresponsive to advocates’ demands to ensure due process for tenants before cases proceed. Given that the New York City Council does not have the power to regulate courts at the municipal level, the solution is clear: our state legislature must pass Statewide Right to Counsel, not only expanding Right to Counsel across the state, but mandating that courts enforce the right both locally and at the state level.
Because my family couldn’t afford a lawyer when I was a teenager, we ended up having to leave the city. While I returned after two years of high school, New York lost my parents for good. We can’t lose any more of our neighbors to a housing system that prioritizes profit over people, and a court system that’s stacked against tenants. Too many New Yorkers are threatened by dangerous living conditions and other forms of eviction for us to wait any longer. We must pass Statewide Right to Counsel this year to keep New York state tenants in their homes.
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Assemblymember Tony Simone represents parts of Manhattan. On Twitter @TonySimone.
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Greening buildings (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
This winter had a lot of erratic weather for New Yorkers, including the second-warmest January ever. While less frigid temperatures may be a relief to some, they serve as a reminder that our climate is changing and these changes are having devastating impacts. Between 2017 and 2021 the U.S. experienced $765 billion in losses and 4,500 deaths related to extreme weather events, eight times higher than in the 1980s. New York alone experienced over $13 billion in losses over the same period and is considered one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate extremes.
New York City is attempting to take dramatic action to reduce carbon emissions through Local Law 97, but opponents are threatening to delay its implementation by seven years. We can’t afford to wait to act because climate change will continue to have unimaginable effects on our planet, our city, and our way of life if we don’t act swiftly to reduce our carbon emissions.
Local Law 97 aims to curb the carbon footprint of large buildings, which account for nearly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions in New York City. The law requires buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to meet growingly stricter emissions limits beginning in 2024 or face hefty penalties. Beyond reducing New York’s carbon footprint, Local Law 97 is intended to promote investment in building upgrades which will improve the quality of life of New York City residents and create new job opportunities in construction and manufacturing.
The policy is receiving backlash from building owners, real estate developers, and some local officials over the current lack of guidance and planned penalties for non-compliance with the law. While the Department of Buildings has finalized some rules, they have yet to provide clarity on several elements key to implementation. Rules regarding the purchase of renewable energy credits and how penalties will be altered for those who make good faith efforts to reduce emissions have not been finalized. For building owners who would need to start preparing for compliance now, many claim they will end up paying fines regardless of whether they attempt to make improvements. Concern over the impact of the law on building owners has led some legislators to introduce a City Council bill to delay implementation by seven years.
Even if efforts to delay Local Law 97 are defeated, the law as currently written still lacks the teeth to properly incentivize enough building owners to engage in retrofitting. Without including a cap on the number of renewable energy credits or RECs a building can purchase, property owners can maintain compliance with the law without lowering emissions.
It’s estimated that 25% of multi-family properties and 66% of office properties currently above 2030 benchmarks can achieve compliance solely through purchasing RECs. Also of concern is whether the Department of Buildings will have the resources to enforce the law properly. The Department of Buildings was among many agencies to have its funding reduced in proposed budget cuts by the Adams Administration.
The desire of building owners to rely on RECs makes sense since rules on penalty adjustments for good faith efforts have not been finalized and potential investment in building improvements may not lead to the necessary emissions reductions required by the law. New York has established financing structures such as CPACE to remediate these concerns. Through the program, property owners can recoup the money spent on green upgrades made over a three-year period. But the city should do more to provide property owners with assurance that investing in building improvements is the correct decision.
In the current drafted rules, the Department of Buildings has offered a one sentence solution for how good faith efforts to retrofit buildings will be taken into consideration when deciding on penalties for not meeting emissions standards. However, to property owner advocates, such as the Real Estate Board of New York, this is an underwhelming solution.
If we want the retrofitting of buildings to occur, the finalized rules need to encourage groups like REBNY to get on board. One potential strategy is to enact a moratorium on fines for those that demonstrate good faith efforts (which also needs to be defined) to retrofit buildings to meet emission standards whether or not their buildings meet 2024 targets. Doing so would further encourage investment by building owners in upgrades rather than choosing to pay fines or purchase energy credits.
For Local Law 97 to be effective, implementation must incentivize building owners to take action to reduce emissions instead of accepting fines and to do so through building upgrades rather than the purchase of RECs. Because, while fines can act as an incentive, they won’t reduce our emissions; only making intentional building improvements will. Ultimately, it is vital to the City’s carbon emissions goals that Local Law 97 makes the impact of fines felt for those who don’t comply, is forgiving of those who make good faith efforts to retrofit buildings, and that the Department of Buildings has the resources needed to properly implement the law.
Local Law 97 is at risk of failing because it is our nature to discount the cost of the future and to think of climate change as a future problem. But we are running out of time to develop solutions that will reduce our carbon footprint and Local Law 97 is an opportunity to do so. Without a robust implementation of the policy, our buildings will continue to deteriorate, our emission levels will remain unchanged, and instead of the future of our city being in our hands it will be in the hands of our climate and forces out of our control.
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Noah Brook is a graduate student specializing in policy analysis at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
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Welcoming migrants to NYC (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
As Passover begins this week, it provides us with a critical opportunity to reflect on immigration, freedom, and the holiday’s relevance for Jews and non-Jews alike. Today more than ever.
“When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33-34
So the Bible reminds us as we celebrate Passover. We look back to the persecution and enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, and remember their flight to freedom. We are urged to reflect on what it means to be a stranger, and recommit to welcoming and caring for the strangers in our midst.
Let’s remember that we, as Americans, were once strangers in this land, and not so long ago. Let’s remember that our forebears took risks to come to unknown shores. Please, this Passover, tell that history to your children and grandchildren; teach them their immigrant story. I urge each of us to find an artifact from our ancestors and include it on our Passover tables as a reminder that we are all immigrants.
For me, the Passover story is a story about human rights, about the intrinsic right of every person to flee harm at the hands of an oppressor – and about the fundamental responsibility each of us has to see those from another land not as “aliens,” but as human beings worthy of our concern, compassion, respect, and love.
Tragically, our country has not learned this enduring lesson. When President Biden took office, he ended the Trump-era practice of detaining immigrant families fleeing war, gang violence, discrimination, and poverty when they arrive at our border. But in March, the Biden Administration began taking steps to return to this cruel practice, and days later announced plans to implement a transit ban that will bar families with children and all adults from being able to seek asylum in the U.S. Outrageous!
We’ve all read about the warehousing of immigrants – including children – in overcrowded, regimented, inhumane places where they are denied access to medical care, adequate food and drinking water, and even basic hygiene items like soap or toothpaste. The lifelong harms associated with detention, particularly for children, are dire. The ban on seeking asylum will inevitably lead to more migrant deaths and family separations. In the process, it will put more immigrant children at risk of ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws, as recently reported in The New York Times.
Last year, New York City saw a huge influx of buses arriving at the Port Authority carrying thousands of immigrants shipped like cargo on the orders of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. (Surely a new low in ruthlessly exploiting human suffering for political gain.) I have been one of many volunteers on site to welcome these strangers to our city. The location has become a hub where immigrants, who after they arrive often end up living in city-run shelters, come looking for food, clothing, and services. And what they want more than anything is jobs.
The volunteers have been extraordinary. They have donated more clothing than is possible to imagine, are engaging houses of worship in the shelter effort, and are now signing up additional volunteers to do even more. What troubles me, however, as I stated in an op-ed in Urban Matters published by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, is that Mayor Adams, who continues to take credit for being welcoming, does not recognize or truly partner with the volunteers and organizations that are actually on the ground and making a difference. His administration must do more, starting, very simply, by ensuring that every new New Yorker has an NYC ID card.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I can say with confidence that the Port Authority Bus Terminal is on nobody’s list of great travel destinations. But as I think about the meaning of Passover, about the lessons it has to teach us about freedom and the moral obligation that every Jew and non-Jew shares to do right by strangers, this maligned New York City location feels sacred. It has become a beacon for the strangers among us – a place to get clothing, a cup of coffee or something to eat, and a helping hand from people who see new arrivals and do not look away.
This Passover season I will continue to volunteer at Port Authority. I will remind myself that despite the inhumanity of immigration policy at every level of our government, good people find a way – and sometimes in the most unlikely places.
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Ruth Messinger, former Manhattan borough president and Democratic nominee for Mayor, is a global ambassador for American Jewish World Service and a social justice consultant.
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